The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014: Agriculture and Update 2

First, the update: As of early this morning (September 25, 2015), there have been 1,198 downloads of Cites & Insights 15:9 (1,061 of them the single-column version). Also as of now, sales of the book have more than doubled, to a total of four paperback copies and one PDF ebook. For those of you hoping to see an anonymized version of the data available on figshare, we’re now one-seventh of the way there; one more sale would put us one-sixth of the way there.

Now, a quick note about agriculture (which, for this study, includes aquaculture, fisheries and other aspects of raising and processing plants and animals, including food and some aspects of nutrition). It’s one field that gets only a stub chapter in the excerpted version—but it’s also a field where including the whole world of DOAJ-listed journals makes a big difference.

To wit: where the interim report and the Walt at Random post (which omits one graph) show 286 journals (excluding C, as almost all of the new book does) publishing 14,879 articles in 2014, the complete study includes 418 journals (excluding C) publishing 19,861 articles in 2014. That’s a full third more articles from 46% more journals (as expected, the added journals tend to be smaller). There’s also a shift toward no-fee journals: of those actually publishing articles in 2014, the no-fee percentage was 62% for the smaller group and 66% for the more complete set—and while it’s still true that (as with most STEM fields) a majority of articles are in APC-charging journals, the percentage of articles in no-fee journals went from 44% for the smaller group to 48% in the larger (and for that larger group, articles in no-fee journals were at least half of all articles in 2013, 2012 and 2011).

In the smaller report, the average cost per article for articles involving APCs was $734.07, or $397.05 for all articles. Those figures don’t change enormously: for the fuller report, the average is now $729.95 for articles in APC-charging journals or $349.89 across all articles.

Agriculture OA journals in 55 countries published articles in 2014; 19 countries published 300 articles or more. It’s an interesting list from top (Brazil, with more than the next three countries put together) to bottom (Egypt—among the 19 top countries, that is, a list that also includes Bangladesh, Romania and the Czech Republic).

For more details on this area and on 27 others (together with lots of other stuff), buy the book.

Oh, and for graphics fans, here are the two graphs from Chapter 12, Agriculture:

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